On Mar 1, 6:58*pm, "Michael R N Dolbear" wrote:

wrote

Note that many other TOCs, including the also First-owned Great
Western, have lower travelcard premia so it is still a no-brainer to
get one, e.g. from Oxford where the premium is £3.50 on the
same £21 day return fare to London Terminals and £5 (FCC &
super off-peak only) from Brighton (CDR £15).

Checking some more locations I see the premium from Winchester
is £9.80. With a zones 1-6 day travelcard at £8, what is the point
of selling an out-of London day travelcard at that price other than
to rip people off to avoid a queue at Waterloo? This is especially
odd given that the premium from Basingstoke (also SWT) is only
£4.80 (via Woking).

The Basingstoke (and Reading) oddity is due, I think, to the existence
of the other route to London via Reading and GWR. The differential
between SOP and OP has a similar distribution.

The premium from Winchester is just weirdness. A SWT ticket office will
sell me a 1-6 day travelcard at £8 - I ask for a ODTC "from Surbiton" -
so you buy two tickets with no need to queue at Waterloo even to use a
machine (but you can't buy it from a machine /at Winchester/ so you may
have a longer queue there).

Good strategy - a Day Travelcard "from Surbiton" is of course simply a
z1-6 Day Travelcard (Surbiton being in zone 6), but to issue it on a
rail ticket issuing system I think an appropriate origin station had
to be specified, where 'appropriate' is I would imagine any station in
zones 1-6.

Some of the online booking websites (though notably not East Coast)
can be coaxed into offering Day Travelcards too, but you need to ask
for the right thing - an off-peak return from a station in the
appropriate zone to 'London' normally seems to do the trick. (Worth
bearing in mind that purchases from WebTIS based-sites such as
Southern appear to be available for collection almost immediately -
potentially helpful if the station one is travelling from doesn't have
an open ticket office, or else has staff that aren't willing to do
play along.)